[dwattttt]

The FASTA format stores nucleotides in text form... compression is used to make this tractable at genome sizes, but it's by no means perfect.

Depending on what you need to represent, you can get a 4x reduction in data size without compression at all, by just representing a GATC with 2 bits, rather than 8.

Compression on top of that "should" result in the same compressed size as the original text (after all, the "information" being compressed is the same), except that compression isn't perfect.

Newlines are an example of something that's "information" in the text format that isn't relevant, yet the compression scheme didn't know that.

[hyghjiyhu]

I think one important factor you missed to account for is frameshifting. Compression algorithms work on bytes - 8 bits. Imagine that you have the exact same sequence but they occur at different offsets mod 4. Then your encoding will give completely different results, and the compression algorithm will be unable to make use of the repetition.

[dwattttt]

I was actually under the impression compression algorithms tend to work over a bitstream, but I can't entirely confirm that.

[Sesse__]

Some are bit-by-bit (e.g. the PPM family of compressors[1]), but the normal input granularity for most compressors is a byte. (There are even specialized ones that work on e.g. 32 bits at a time.)

[1] Many of the context models in a typical PPM compressor will be byte-by-byte, so even that isn't fully clear-cut.

[bede]

A Zstd maintainer clarified this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45251544

> Ultimately, Zstd is a byte-oriented compressor that doesn't understand the semantics of the data it compresses

[vintermann]

They output a bitstream, yeah but I don't know of anything general purpose which effectively consumes anything smaller than bytes (unless you count various specialized handlers in general-purpose compression algorithms, e.g. to deal with long lists of floats)